I'm setting up a new XP install for a fairly computer illiterate person. The specs on the PC are garbagey at best, 256MB ram, nuff said.

Instead of putting on a full-blown antivirus, to save on system resources, i'd like to give him day-to-day access to a restricted account only. But it's his PC nevertheless, so i'll give him the admin password of course, but is there any way for XP to auto-prompt for privilege elevation with a password dialog or something rather than erroring out nastily with insufficient privileges and forcing him to go through Run As manually every time?

thanks,

Leon

not really. its still a task to get vista to prompt for escalation most of the time. id just leave him as an administrator anyways and use reduced permissions for the most likely infection point (ie: IE)

http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/04/r...-in-secure.html

the other option would be to build your own fake password prompt but thats only useful in a pretty specific scenario

i use this in a library where we have a old crappy program that demands admin privileges to run properly

user starts a shortcut for a .bat

.bat prompts for a fake 'admin' password which is stored in plain text in the bat(which i nearly worthless if they get a hold of it). if correct the .bat fires runasspc which allows me to encrypt the real admin password in a locally stored file. runasspc is in my case locked to a specific .exe but you can use it without that restriction. again i wouldnt recommend this method unless you have a very specific function that needs to be elevated.